Trump’s Fraudulent Voter-Fraud Commission

President Trump’s repeated claim that “millions” of noncitizens voted illegally in the 2016 election...lined up nicely with a yearslong crusade by Republican officials to convince Americans that “voter fraud” is an actual problem. As Mr. Trump’s own lawyers have pointed out, it’s not. But that hasn’t stopped the president from trying, as he so often does, to commandeer the machinery of the federal government to justify his own falsehoods. The most recent example was his creation last week of an advisory commission whose ostensible goal is to “enhance the American people’s confidence in the integrity of the voting processes,” with an emphasis on weeding out “improper” or “fraudulent” registration and voting. ...

Voting fraud is extremely rare, and in-person fraud — the only kind that would be caught by voter ID laws — is essentially nonexistent, as study after study has shown. ...

The purported purpose of Mr. Trump’s commission — to restore confidence in elections — is laughable, not only because Republicans have spent the past decade sowing seeds of doubt with hyped-up tales of fraud. In reality, voters’ confidence is mainly affected by whether their preferred candidate wins, not by the existence of voter ID or other laws. ...

Real reforms should include improved technology, more opportunities for early voting, and better-trained poll workers, as a comprehensive 2014 report produced by Mr. Bauer, a Democrat, and his Republican colleague, Benjamin Ginsberg, found.